The DVD case aptly summarizes what you are expected
to get from Good Night and Good Luck, the 2005 movie directed and
co-written by noted actor, George Clooney, who also has a supporting role in
the film:

It’s 1953, and the piece of talking furniture called
TV is still a novelty in America’s living rooms. On it, Sen. Joseph McCarthy
uses fear, falsehoods and belligerence to become arguably the most powerful man
in the land. On it, newsman Edward R. Murrow, who’s had his fill of the
Senator’s tactics, fights back.

In 2007, Crown Forum, a division of Random House,
published the 663-page Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator
Joe McCarthy and His Fight against America’s Enemies. With more space on its
dust jacket, here is how the publisher summarizes the book:

Author and journalist M. Stanton Evans, a long-time
student of Cold War issues, spent more than six years researching this
explosive new evaluation of Joe McCarthy. In documents buried in U.S.
government archives, including troves of previously unexamined FBI files,
formerly missing State Department records, and heretofore unknown data from
congressional investigations, he discovered the hidden history of America’s
backstage Cold War. His astonishing findings reveal that McCarthy understood,
better than his opponents cared to admit, the insidious forces that posed a
very real threat to American society and institutions.

One would not expect Evans to treat Clooney’s movie
very favorably, and he doesn’t. Before we share what he has to say, though,
let us give some background and context to the so-called “Red scare” period of
the late 1940s and early 1950s, something that is usually missing in treatments
of so-called “McCarthyism,” whether it be in scholarly tomes, history
textbooks, or popular movies.

Historical Background

Occasioned in part by the great disillusionment
caused by the unprecedented mass slaughter that was known at the time as the
Great War and then by the Great Depression, Communist ideology enjoyed enormous
success in the United States in the 1930s and the early 1940s, especially among
the intellectual class. Aiding the Communist cause was the fact that leading
opinion molders in the country, most notably The New York Times and the
Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, itself, were papering over the tyranny in
the Soviet Union, leading the public to believe that it truly represented a
positive alternative to our apparently failed system (See The New York Times and Joseph Stalin
and Mission to Moscow.).

Much more than public opinion was involved in the
penetration of American society and government, however. Communism, acting
like a particularly virulent evangelical secular religion, penetrated
organizations from the highest to the lowest throughout the country. At the
top were those who had taken the step to become dues-paying members of the U.S.
Communist Party, but above them were Stalin’s espionage agents. Rigid party
discipline was enforced; party members followed orders. To be party members
was virtually synonymous with being espionage agents for the Soviet Union, that
is, if that is what they were ordered to be.

The fruit of this dangerous brew was brought to the
attention of FDR’s anti-Communist security chief, Adolf Berle, in September of
1939 by Communist Party defector, Whittaker Chambers. This account is from
journalist Isaac Don Levine, who had set up the meeting and was present when it
took place:

The general picture drawn by Chambers
that night was of two Soviet undercover "centers" or rings which,
according to his firsthand knowledge, had operated in Washington for many
years. One was concerned with infiltrating unionized labor and getting
Communists into the federal service; the other, with political and military
affairs. Both groups were gathering and supplying confidential data to
Moscow.

We learned that the business of filching
from State Department and other secret government files had been well organized
by the Communist "apparatus." Most of the time important papers
would be microfilmed and replaced before they had been missed, and the material
would be delivered to Soviet couriers, operating under aliases, for
transmission to Russia.

It was clear that Chambers knew his way
about official Washington, and he exhibited unusual familiarity with the inside
of the State Department. He named six of its officials as having
knowingly furnished confidential data to Soviet undercover agents. Mr.
Berle and I were shocked by the list, which included the Hiss brothers, then in
minor positions. (See FDR
Winked at Soviet Espionage.)

Among those named as spies at that
meeting was Lauchlin
Currie, a White House aide who was later instrumental in putting Owen Lattimore in a position
to exert great influence over U.S. China policy.

When Berle brought the news to President
Roosevelt, FDR blew him off, as he would later do with Martin Dies, chairman of
the House Un-American Activities Committee. This is from Dies’ account of
their meeting:

We had established the fact that
thousands of Communists, and their stooges and sympathizers were on the
Government payroll, and I said, "Mr. President, we must do something about
this. Here is a list of many of these people. We have their
membership records in Communist-controlled organizations. If you
understand the Communists as well as I do, you will know that they are in the
government for one purpose alone, and that is to steal important military and
diplomatic secrets to transmit them to Moscow."

The President was furious. I was
surprised at his anger. He called me "Mr. Congressman”—he had called
me “Martin” before—Mr. Congressman, you must see a bug-a-boo under every
bed." "No, I never look under the bed," I replied.
"Well," he said, "I have never seen a man that had such exaggerated
ideas about this thing. I do not believe in Communism any more than you
do, but there is nothing wrong with the Communists in this country.
Several of the best friends I have are Communists." (See FDR Tipped Pro-Soviet Hand
Early.)

Not until after the war, with the Soviet
Union emerging as the big winner and the Republican Party gaining control of
the House of Representatives in the 1946 elections, did the chickens begin
coming home to roost. The Un-American Activities Committee received new life,
and former key Communist operative, Elizabeth Bentley,
became its star witness. Before she had finished testifying, she had named
over 80 Americans as spies for the Soviet Union. She was followed by Chambers,
who was subpoenaed by the committee. He corroborated much of what Bentley had
said, adding additional names to the spy list, most spectacularly, the then
powerful and prominent Alger Hiss.

The reaction of the Democratic
administration and much of the mainstream press was very much like what
President Roosevelt’s had been earlier. Though somewhat less brazen about it
because the charges were now out in the public—to the extent that the media
publicized them—their response to the revelations that the government was
riddled with spies for a country that was now undeniably the enemy can best be
characterized as a circling of the wagons.

The massive infiltration of the
government and charges of wholesale espionage were boiled down for public
consumption to a test of veracity between the patrician, “respectable” Hiss and
the slovenly former Communist spy Chambers. How protection of the party
trumped protection of the country is perhaps best illustrated by the
performance on the stand of Berle, one of the few high-level administration
figures who could be described as a strong anti-Communist. Asked about the
revelations of Chambers in his meeting back in 1939, he minimized their
importance by resorting to provable lies, duly relayed uncritically to the
American public by The New York Times. (See FDR’s Right-Hand Perjurer?).

Another opportunity to clean house was
missed, as primarily cosmetic changes were made. Most significantly, U.S.
policy in the Far East, particularly relating to China and Korea, remained in
control of people with strong connections to those originally revealed by Chambers
to be Soviet agents. The anti-Communist ambassador to China, General Patrick Hurley,
had been forced into resignation in 1945, and the insightful 1947 report on China policy
by the experienced anti-Communist General Albert C. Wedemeyer continued to be
suppressed.

China fell to the Communists in 1949 and
North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. Suspicions were rampant in Congress
that continued Communist influence within the U.S. government was related to
these policy disasters. At the same time, Congressional committee researchers
learned of numerous security risks within the government who had either
remained at their positions after being discovered or had been allowed to
resign from one agency and then get a job at another.

The Case of Annie Lee Moss

The foregoing, in barest outline, is the general
context in which Senator McCarthy became prominent as a Red hunter in the early
1950s. The specific context of the episode that we see in Good Night and
Good Luck is as follows:

Most interested initially in Communist
infiltration of the State Department, the subcommittee that McCarthy headed later
turned its attention to subversion in the Army, primarily by civilians working
at the sensitive headquarters of the Army Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, New
Jersey. Related to that investigation was the case of the black female code
clerk by the name of Annie Lee Moss who worked for the Army in the Pentagon.
“Called before the subcommittee in early 1954, she was depicted at the time,
and still is,” as Evans puts it, “as the quintessential McCarthy martyr.”

The FBI had managed to place one of its
deep-cover agents, Mary Markward, near the top of the Communist Party
organization in Washington, DC. She had risen to treasurer of the local cell,
keeping membership rolls and records of dues payments and subscriptions to
party organs. One of those members who had also subscribed to the Communist Daily
Worker was a person by the name of Annie Lee Moss.

Moss is shown in the movie denying any
connection at any time in her life with the Communist Party. The FBI witness,
Markward, had never actually seen her, and, according to Moss and her
defenders, it was simply a case of mistaken identity because there were three
people in the DC telephone book by the name of “Annie Lee Moss.” Unfortunately
for this line of defense, according to Evans, “… there was ample reason in 1954
to know the Moss on the witness stand and the Moss in the party records were
one and the same. Close study of the hearing records would have been enough to
show this. For instance, the Moss named by Markward had been a cafeteria
employee, lived for a time with a Hattie Griffin, and received the Daily
Worker—all this testified to by Markward on February 23. The Moss
appearing before McCarthy, by her own account, had been a cafeteria employee,
lived for a time with Hattie Griffin, and received the Daily Worker.
Anyone comparing the transcripts could see there was no identity mix-up.”

The Annie Lee Moss appearing before the
subcommittee had also lived for a time at 72 R Street, S.W., in the District.
The Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB), established by the Congress to
monitor the Communist Party, after reviewing party records concluded in a 1958
report, “The situation that has resulted on the Moss question is that the
party’s own records, copies of which are now in evidence, and the authenticity
of which it does not dispute … show an Annie Lee Moss, 72 R St., S.W., as a
party member in the mid-1940s.”

The case was really open and shut. The
Annie Lee Moss who had been a dues-paying member of the Communist Party and the
Annie Lee Moss who worked as a code clerk in the Pentagon were one and the same
person. But with the destruction of the reputation of Senator Joseph McCarthy
taking precedence in the national agenda, it is The Legend of Annie Lee Moss
(which Evans names his chapter on the subject) that has become the popular
truth. And so it is with Clooney’s movie, as Evans describes it:

A … recent treatment of the Moss affair
that deserves brief notice isn’t a scholarly work, but undoubtedly has done
more to spread disinformation about the case than a dozen history books
together. This is the George Clooney film Good Night and Good Luck,
released in 2005, based on the 1954 confrontation between McCarthy and Edward
R. Murrow (the title of the film is taken from Murrow’s habitual sign-off).
This Clooney opus portrays McCarthy as a fearsome dragon and Murrow as the
brave knight-errant who dared to slay him. In a mix of modern production
methods and video clips taken from the archives, the movie affects to be a
study in cinema verité, supposedly revealing the evil of McCarthy simply
by showing him in action. The case of Annie Lee Moss is featured, as it was by
Murrow himself back in the 1950s.

It’s of interest that neither in the
Clooney film nor in the original Murrow broadcast is there any evidence
cited to indicate Moss was an innocent victim—the message being conveyed
instead by video clips of Moss and of [Democratic Senator John] McClellan
browbeating [subcommittee chief of staff Roy] Cohn for allegedly treating her
unfairly. In the case of the Murrow broadcast, when not all the relevant data
were known, this was to some extent excusable (though had Murrow and Co. been
the crack journalists they professed to be, they could have dug out the facts
about Hattie Griffin and the like from the hearing transcripts). In the case
of the Clooney film, there is no excuse whatever, as the truth about the case
is fully available to anyone who bothers to review the voluminous SACB reports
and archives of the Bureau.

Amazingly, in a press
interview about all this, Clooney made it clear he had been informed that
Mrs. Moss was a Communist and that he didn’t deny it. Instead, he said,
the real question stressed by Murrow and his colleagues, and therefore in the
Clooney film, was that “they simply demand that she has a right to face her
accuser.” We are thus informed, after fifty years of being told Mrs. Moss was
not a Communist but a mistaken-identity victim, that wasn’t the point at all!
It was, instead, her right to face her accuser.

If Clooney was indeed aware of the
copious evidence on the case, as he should have been in presuming to inform the
world about it, he certainly disguised this knowledge in his movie. In the
interests of historical truth, the data set forth [in this chapter] should at
least have been alluded to, making it clear Mrs. Moss was in fact what Markward
(and McCarthy) said, and not the victim of a mistaken-identity foul-up. But,
of course, if Clooney had brought out these facts of record, he would have had
no movie. Such information would have undercut the thesis of the film about
the bullying and reckless lying of McCarthy.

As for “facing her accuser,” Mrs. Moss
was not denied such right by McCarthy. In keeping with its standard practice,
the subcommittee notified Moss and her attorney that there would be testimony
about her and summoned her to appear at that time to answer Markward’s
statements. Mrs. Moss herself, via a letter from her attorney received the day
of the hearing, declined to do this, saying she was too ill to testify. She
was then asked to appear the following day and came to the hearing room, but
her attorney again said she wasn’t in condition to take the stand. McCarthy,
though skeptical of this, said if she were really too ill to testify he didn’t
want her to do so, but would reschedule her response to Markward. Mrs. Moss
then appeared on March 11, the delay occasioned by her own requests, and not
the doing of McCarthy. (Note: If the accuser-facing reference is to the film
clip in which McClellan lambasted Cohn for mentioning other witnesses who would
testify to the CP status of Mrs. Moss, that appears to have been still more
humbug, and a bit of playacting by McClellan. The matter of such additional
witnesses had been discussed in McClellan’s presence by McCarthy, [Democratic
Senator Henry] Scoop Jackson, and Cohn in the two previous hearings, the latter
attended by Mrs. Moss and her attorney. On those occasions, McClellan hadn’t
said boo about the unfairness of alluding to these other unnamed parties. It
was only after McCarthy left the hearing of March 11 that McClellan
jumped Cohn for referring to this already mooted subject.)

We really should have been suspicious of
a movie that would portray a talking head for William S. Paley’s CBS as
some brave little David going up against a fearsome Goliath in the form of a
junior Senator from Wisconsin.